SERMON PREACHED BY THE RT. REV. MORGAN PORTEUS

BISHOP OF CONNECTICUT (RETIRED)

at the consecration of Suffragan Bishops Clarence Coleridge and Bradford Hastings

October 23, 1981

            “He was terrible to look upon, and there was an awful smell that came from his rotting flesh. And people recoiled and made him an outcast and made him stay at a distance, for he was a leper.” And Matthew said that Jesus cane and put forth His hand and touched him. He has said that many times about Jesus, and so did the other Gospellers: that He put forth His hand and touched them. That is a picture of his ministry. There was no one He would not touch. That is a picture of His life.

            We have come to make two Bishops. The other word that is used is the word “shepherd”, and the heart of the life of shepherds, among many other things that they are and do, is to touch. I think the only book I remember when I was in Seminary is a book whose title I have forgotten. I think it was written by George Adam Smith, and there was a magnificent description of shepherds and what they did.

            He was fascinated by what Jesus said once about Himself: “I am the door of the sheepfold,” and went on to describe that in the city or the village a sheepfold was a pen. But out on the wil­derness late in the afternoon a shepherd had to find a safe place.

            When he found it, he found stones and sticks and logs and he made the outline of the sheepfold one log high. Sheep had been trained not to step over it and vermin would not go under it. Then he left a place that was open and that is where he sat. Then, at the proper time, he called them one by one. He called them by name. Everyone marvels that they remembered their names and came when they were called.

            And then with his hands he touched them. His hands searched every inch of a sheep’s body. He removed sticks and burrs and vermin and he bound up wounds and soothed, and healed. When he was satisfied, he patted it on the rump and let it in, swinging himself aside, and then shut the door with his own body again. And when all had been touched and felt and nursed and ministered to, he bedded down for the night.

            They recognized his voice, I think, because they remembered that that voice treated them and touched them and cared for them and loved them with his hands.

            When I was a little child, I had a recurring bad dream and I can remember waking and calling out in the night and hearing my mother’s voice and not being comforted by my mother’s voice, but knowing that the voice meant she was coming. When she came, she sat by the bed and ran her fingers through my hair and communicated her love by her touch and her tending. Her words and her touch were one.

            Love’s words have to become love’s touch, or love is not real. The touch communicates what words cannot communicate, not in a sen­timental, gooey fashion, but in a real one. I want the touch, not just the words, to tell me that I am loved, that all is well, that 1 am known.

            For touching means someone identifies with you and tries to find you where you are, tries to care and tries to understand and shares what they bring. I think that is what Jesus Christ was all about, and I think that’s what He is all about. Like a shepherd, He stretched forth His hand and He touched then. That is the secret and the heart of His ministry, and that is the secret of His life; reaching and touching out of love in order to bring God’s love and nearness at a dark moment in a person’s life to people, one by one.

            There’s a magnificent little book called “Telling the Truth” by a man named Frederick Buechner. In it he lifts up to us the fact that except by inference, Jesus has little to say about the specific, historical problems of His own day such as poverty or slavery or injustice. It was not the great public issues that He traded in, but the great private issues. Not the struggles of the world, but the struggles of the world within each of us.

            We live in a world that needs all kinds of help and assistance with the problems and issues that are there. But there is a world inside each one of us separated, usually, from the worlds of everyone else around us; and like a snail, each one of us carries his own world upon his back.

            That is the place alone, at night, that no one else can touch; when you face the operation tomorrow; when you seek to deal with your own inadequacies; when you stagger under your own sins; when you face rejection of your love; when you yearn for forgiveness; when you seek to measure up to someone else’s thoughts; when you pick up the phone and hear your child is dead; when you face Christmas unemployed.

            That is the place where we experience the darkness and the loneli­ness of life without God. And it was to that little world Jesus addressed Himself, reached and touched, and shared that darkness with human beings.

            It was written of Him, “He was moved with compassion because He saw the people as sheep with no shepherd,’ no touchers of sheep. And like a shepherd, He moved them: leper, prostitute, tax collector, fisherman, blind, deaf, demented, wearied, perplexed. He stretched forth His hand and He touched them. That was the way He gave himself away, touching the inner longings and questions of people. Touching them with Himself, that God might be known. That was His ministry, that was His life.

            It was late at night and I got off the elevator on the eighth floor at the New Haven hospital. The man I was going to see was dying; his family was there, and his wife had her back to me as I got off and entered into the room. Somehow or other I was compelled to walk up behind her and run my finger across her shoulder. After he died, she wrote me a note that I found, a week or so ago, cleaning out my things: ‘When I felt your finger on my back, I knew it was you, and if you were there, He was there also.” He touched them and He brought them life.

            Isn’t that really the heart of what we recall and re-enact in this Service of Ordination? Touching out of love is the ministry given at every ordination, and the prayer that people who are ordained will have strength to touch and carry out that ministry in order that all people may be inspired to touch and to love. It’s the only way we have of preserving a very simple yet tremendous thing that would otherwise be lost. He touched them, and by touching them, brought them life.

            We come to make two shepherds, two chief touchers of people. Two chief exemplars of ministry for all of us. How are they made Bishops? They will be touched; and they will not become Bishops until they are touched, until that apostolic treasure has been delivered from those who have already received it. That touch is all we have to give them, because that is ourselves all that we received, for that is all Christ had to give and ever gives. And the action is always the same, be you Deacon, Priest or Bishop.

            What are those three forms of ministry for, anyway? Why are there things called Prayer Books with services for all kinds of occasions in them? Is it not to be the reminder that the treasure is committed to us to preserve and to use? And that the services are there to tell us that God never deserts us, but is always there if we will ask Him to come and help Him be there?

            When a person is made a Deacon, a Bishop touches him and delivers ministry, and at that moment commissions him to concentrate on limited things. You are admitted to the holy, common order of servanthood: to handle dishes and bus rides for YPFs and to wash feet and to hold hands, to stand by the sacred mysteries, to identify with tears and laughter, to be immersed in the common humdrum of life that ministry so often wants to forget. But that is where Christ always is, in the commonness where we so often fail to look.

            A Deacon is to learn to be a shepherd and to be content to be a shepherd, touching sheep with his hands; not with his glove, but with his hands, finding that lowly service can be, and is, equal in all ways to sacramental richness. You are not delivering service at that time any more than a dedicated nurse delivers a service when she rubs your back. You are the service then, and if you are not, there is no service from God. Through you at that time comes the knowledge and the certainty of the presence and the love and the caring of God through your touch. that is why we are always Deacons.

            And when you are made a Priest, the whole thing is re-enacted again with the Bishop and Priests touching you. You weren’t suddenly raised to a higher level or a better level or a more complete order of ministry; you were made to go down closer to the people if your ministry means anything. You became more of a Deacon than when you were before, more common, more accessible, more vulnerable, and by the things that were committed to you to do, charged to use your hands at all times, in all places, with all people.

            There is baptism, the crisis that it represents of a person suddenly saying, “I will give up this life for another life.” And if you’re honest and serious, that is hard to do. And it’s hard to deal with the temptation to recant it later. And what do you do as a Priest? Say words, and pour water, and read out of a book, and do it in Church, and go to a party? Yes, do that. That is fine. But that is the outward and visible. There is a deeper question: how do you lead that baby to voluntary death? How do you lead that man or woman to give up his or her life, knowing that unless he does that he does not receive that which is forever?

            How did Abraham take Isaac to the altar on Mount Moriah? He took him by the hand. How did he raise the knife? He held him with the other hand. How did they come down the mountain to face life? Hand in hand. What do you do with a baby? You hold it. What do you do when you hold it? If you have any love, something of you goes as God touches it through your hand. What do you do to an adult as you let him or her know that you have passed this way and the assurance is for real? And then with water you sign them in the sign of love.

            Oh, it’s just like those new birth methods in hospitals, how they take a baby when it is born and lay it upon its mother’s stomach. It is quiet and hushed and there are people with quiet tones. No baby understands a word; no baby recognizes a stomach or a basin of waters but what is transmitted is the transmission of love, that it has passed through death and has come to life. And in baptism, that is the touch that is delivered. That is the life that is given, and it is gone.

            Or with absolution, is it just a nice pretty form in a book, and someone coning to do what is necessary to do? Is it a formula or the simple sign of making the Cross and sending them away? Or is it not rather if you are moved as a person to want to be like the prodi­gal’s father who ran down the road and smothered out his confession by saying, “My boy, I have been there. You are forgiven. You are free.” And love has done that.

            Or at marriage. Is there anything you do but put your hand there to bear witness to the fact that God is concerned about ideals and pilgrimage, that He will walk every way if you will lift it to Him, and of simply saying He is part and parcel of what is here?

            Or in Eucharist. Is it all duty, or Rite I or II or 1928 or 2028? Is it all proper and out of the book, and is it sung or said? Is it with vestments or no? Or is there not in it the chance above all chances of touching human beings with Him? Of Christ Himself under the form of bread and wine delivered by your hand into an upturned hand that represents an upturned life that may not have been upturned for God knows how long?

            The man who sits in the middle, our Presiding Bishop, has the most miraculous way of communicating you with the Host. As he looks straight at you and says, “The Body of Christ”, and with thumb and forefinger puts the wafer in your hand, and somehow those other three fingers envelop your hand, and you find yourself holding hands with the Presiding Bishop with a wafer between you, and suddenly there are two hands and a wafer, and two lives with Christ in the middle, and two private little worlds that have never dared to speak to one another opening to one another because the love of Christ is there.

            That, for me, is the fulfillment of all the words that could ever be written to be proper or right about what sacraments are. Love is there because Christ is there and has made Himself known through His servant, and that is Eucharist. And the heart of its meaning is in its deliverance by the touch of a hand. People are ordained to touch and to lead people who are not ordained in churches to touch also, to testify to God’s nearness and love and light in all kinds of places and with all kinds of people.

            And the two persons who come here tonight to be ordained as Bishops have done that well. Their touch has brought light and life and comfort and joy, and you only have to look at each of them to know that that is true. They have brought Him to bear in the lives of people. It is no wonder that they are to be chief shepherds in touching. So in this service, they will become Bishops by the impos­ition of the touch of Bishops, once again the delivery of the sign of Christ’s loving ministry, so that in addition to all that has been delivered to them in diaconate and priesthood, they will now be weighted even more, driven closer down the ladder to life, to those who are called to serve.

            They will become more deacon, more servant, more shepherd, more touchers than ever before. They are not set apart to sit away from you. Now they belong to all of us through the sacrament of commonness.

            So now they will confirm, and what does that mean but to reach forth hands and to touch. No one will remember the words that are said, or the sermon, or the mitre, or the cope, or the chimere, or the music. What they will remember is like that little girl in the Polaroid ad who steps beside the Bishop and flusters him by saying, “Will you have your picture taken with me?” And he put his hand around her and that was probably the moment of her confirmation.

            How you touch people will deliver to them whether they are called to a ministry then and there, and whether they will dare respond. They will be asked to ordain, to preserve in those people who are chosen this ministry of touching that it may be passed on, but from the moment a person comes it will be the touch of hand or arm through postulancy, candidate, ordination, that will determine just how sincere and real ministry comes across from those who are its chief shepherds.

            They will be asked to bless all the time and all kinds of things and all kinds of people. They better believe that that is real. They are numbered then among apostles and that is fearsome. And a blessing is not magic. It is simply a way of saying as He said. I wish I could touch each one of you today so I raise my hand and the shower of love for me is the shower of God through me to you.

            In whatever role we play, it is in touching that life and love are communicated. It is in touching that oftentimes we are permitted to gain entrance into scared and lonely lives. It is in touching that we carry on Christ’s ministry by giving Him the moment at that moment to enter the sea and to do His ministry there.

            My brothers, how you touch is the open testimony that you both have, that one qualification which is needed for being a Bishop. At his last convention with us, Bishop Hutchens used a text, “That which I have seen and handled declare I unto you”, and then said to us, “My witness of the Resurrection is not literal, for I am a twentieth century man, but I could stand here all day long and recount to you the presence and working of Christ in the lives of people with whom I have lived and with whom I have worked.”

            That same message we know in each one of you. Your lives, your work, your ministry, your laughter, have born record that you have seen Christ, that you have reached out of caring because you have seen Him, and you have touched people with that one message that the Lord is risen.

            So in the years ahead, yes, be for great causes and speak for great causes and work for great causes, for poor and oppressed and for disenfranchised, but no more resolution, no more speeches; let it be touching, let it be love. Behind all that is in the new office delivered to you, deal with the lives of people as you have dealt with them. Listen to and reach to and speak to; touch out of love those private lives of rich people and poor people alike, for that’s the same; of weak people and strong people, for it happens to all of them.

            Risk your office, even though it’s new. Risk your position. Above all, risk yourselves to dare to touch the little worlds of people. Be vulnerable as you’ve never been vulnerable before. Open the one thing we all love in each of you, your humanity. Open it up, because that is the choicest gift you have to give to this Church. And He blessed your humanity as He blessed all of our humanity by taking it. That is what He loves most in you. That is what we yearn for and want from one another.

            So with your humanity, touch humanity, that those little private, scared lives of people may be touched by His love. Lift up in your life that One who made Himself of no reputation and took upon Him the form of a servant, and out of never-ending love gave Himself away quite literally as He touched all manner of life. Then, and only then, you will receive what is written in the Collect for St. James Day, that spirit of self-denying service by which alone you may have true authority among your people.

            Once upon a time, a young man wanted to give his life in the service of his fellow man. So he gave his life to the Salvation Army and they sent him to New York, and New York assigned him to the Bowery. It was in the days when the Bowery was just full of old drunken bodies lying everywhere. He went up to the second floor and reported, and the stench of human vomit nearly drove him away.

            He walked in and found thirty old decrepit men lying and sitting, asleep and awake, but dead drunk and filthy, and one man, his shirt­sleeves rolled up, undressing people, washing them and caring for them. And he went and said to him, “I’m here - I’m reporting.” And he said, “Thank God you’re here. Take off your coat and roll up your sleeves and take that old man over there and undress him and wash him and put him to bed.”

            The young man took off his coat and stood there and tried desperately to engage his white, clean hands in that human filth upon that old man’s shirt. Suddenly he felt warm hands upon his shoulder and was moved aside and the old man engaged his hand as though he were undoing something clean, and began to unbutton him and turned and said, “You see, my boy, it’s how we touch them that shows them how much we love them.”

            Stretch forth your hands, Brad and Clarence, and help us to con­tinue to stretch forth our hands, too. For Jesus stretched forth His hand, and touched them, and brought them life. God bless you both. God bless Arthur, our Bishop. God, forever bless the Diocese of Connecticut.

AMEN!